Returning to the Eternal Religion 251

There are two kinds of activities—good and bad. If you act nicely and
perform pious activities, then you get good fortune, and if you act sin-
fully, then you have to suffer. Therefore Sukadeva Goswami says:

tasmat puraivasy iha papa-niskrtau
yateta mrtyor avipadyatatmana
dosasya drstva guru-laghavam yatha
bhisak cikitseta rujam nidanavit
[Bhag. 6.1.8]

There are different kinds of atonement. If you commit some sin and
counteract it by something else, that is atonement. There are examples of
this in the Christian Bible. Sukadeva Goswami says, ‘“‘You should know
that you are responsible, and according to the gravity of sinful life, you
should accept some type of atonement as described in the sdstras, the
scriptures.”

Actually, just as when one is diseased he must go to a doctor and pay
doctor bills as a form of atonement, according to the Vedic way of life
there is a class of brahmanas to whom one should go for the prescribed
atonement according to the sins one commits.

Sukadeva Goswami says that one has to execute the prescribed atone-
ment according to the gravity of one’s sinful life. He continues the exam-
ple: dosasya drstva guru-laghavam yatha bhisak cikitseta rujam nidanavit.
When you consult a physician, he prescribes an inexpensive medicine or
a costly medicine according to the gravity of the disease. If you simply
have a headache, he may prescribe an aspirin, but if you have something
very severe, he immediately prescribes a surgical operation which will
cost a thousand dollars. Similarly, sinful life is a diseased condition, so
one must follow the prescribed cure to become healthy.

Acceptance of the chain of birth and death is a diseased condition of
the soul. The soul has no birth and death and no disease because it is
spirit. Krsna says in the Bhagavad-gita [2.20]: na jdyate, the soul has no
birth, and mriyate, it has no death. Nityah sasvato ‘yam purano/ na hanyate
hanyamane Sarire. The soul is eternal and everlasting. It is not lost with
the dissolution of this body. Na hanyate hanyamane Sarire. Na hanyate
means that it is not killed or destroyed, even after the destruction of this
body.

The missing point of modern civilization is that there is no educational
system to instruct people on what happens after death. Thus we have the
most defective education because without this knowledge of what
